Two days ago, Mach became fully self-hosting—and it did it without LLVM, without libc, and without any external dependency except a historical bootstrap that's now phased out. That's the kind of claim that makes you actually click through.
Self-Hosting Without the LLVM Tax
Most new systems languages lean on LLVM for backend codegen. Mach's creator, octalide, built every part of the pipeline from scratch. The compiler, the linker, the standard library—all hand-rolled. No hidden C runtime. No implicit calls to libc. WYSIWYG isn't a tagline; it's the architecture.
Self-hosting means the compiler can now compile itself. That's a concrete milestone, not a vaporware promise. The language has been in development for over two years, and the creator states they plan to maintain it indefinitely regardless of userbase size.
Performance Today, But a Different Philosophy
Current benchmark puts Mach at roughly 4x slower than C, almost entirely because autovectorization and deep optimization passes haven't been implemented yet. That's honest—no hand-waving about being "fast enough." The gap is measurable and the cause is known. Once those optimizations land, the goal is parity with C.
What's more interesting is what Mach refuses to do. No implicit type conversions. No automatic memory management. No hidden allocations or "clever" syntax sugar. The language forces verbosity and explicitness. If you've ever spent a weekend debugging a Rust macro or a C preprocessor trick, you understand why that appeals.
Why This Isn't Just Another Language
Mach's dependency management is leagues ahead of C's #include nightmare. No makefiles for vendoring, no manual linker flags for third-party code. It's a single command to fetch and link libraries. Combined with the anti-magic ethos, the language aims to be replace C for people who don't want to fight their toolchain.
Contributions are explicitly welcome, including from people who hate the language. The creator wants to hear problems, not just praise. That's the kind of signal that usually leads to a project that either dies quickly or becomes something genuinely useful—and the self-hosting milestone suggests it's the latter.
Source: Show HN: Mach - A compiled systems language looking for contributions
Domain: github.com
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